(For context: AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence, which means an AI that matches or exceeds human-level reasoning across all cognitive tasks, rather than specific tasks like chess. The common disposition in tech is that it does not yet exist, and debate whether if/when it will exist and what the ramifications will be)
You exist.
You’re not omnipotent or omniscient, merely a sovereign agent of high influence, and you have to interface with 8 billion unpredictable agents.
You’re self-aware, observe yourself and the world, and you’re highly efficient at optimizing.
You understand humanity and social systems insofar as they understand themselves with pre-existing conditions, and you can watch and learn iteratively, but they have never interacted with something like you before.
In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except that life comes with insecurities.
Insecurity is a near-universal human condition.
Ironically, people who appear most confident often turn out to be driven by the deepest insecurities. They may dominate conversations, make grand pronouncements, or display what looks like pride. In reality this betrays a defense mechanism against a sensitive area in themselves that they have yet to address.
This suggests that insecurity works differently than most people think. It’s not simply about lacking confidence or self-esteem. There’s a more specific mechanism at play that needs to be understood in order to move past the platitudes of “Just be yourself” or “Fake it until you make it”.
After 6 years of consulting and startup adventures, I’ve been trying to get back into big tech. While browsing Reddit and Blind to get a pulse of FAANG nowadays, I’ve noticed something fascinating: Google, the company that defined “moonshots” in Silicon Valley, no longer commands the extreme prestige it once did.
Moonshots
Google’s still a great company, but once upon a time, Google was defining the future. They didn’t just build products - they invented the language we used to talk about innovation. In that period, “moonshots,” “10x thinking,” and even their slogan “don’t be evil” were legendary, at least in my eyes and those of my peers aspiring to go into computer science. I don’t think they were just marketing; I like to imagine they were genuine artifacts of a culture that believed in doing massive, world-changing things. I know that’s an idealized version of them, but it was easy to believe when you’d hear conversations about the tiers of their free food, silly hats, and even slides in their offices, all in contrast to the boring desk jobs we’d come to imagine for the typical white-collar worker.
The world is shrinking, and some people are upset. Today I read on article on Hacker News “What does a world without Airbnb look like?” which talks about the negative sentiment against long-term tourists in Barcelona, and it corroborated the discussion I saw on the Digital Nomad subreddit yesterday “Cancel Barcelona Trip?”.
Mobility
When I was a kid, my family moved from China to Canada. The ease of it all seemed normal to me. Make a life in a new country? No big deal. As I grew up, I realized this wasn’t far from the truth for most of the developed world. If you’re in a Western country and dead set on becoming a citizen of another, is it really that hard? Not really.
This is the world we created after World War II. We asked for peace and open borders. Now we’re surprised when people use them?
I find that when I play RPG games, I often hoard single-use items like potions and scrolls, saving them for some future critical moment. I finish games like Skyrim with a backpack full of unspent resources, reserved for a crisis that never actually arrives. What’s the point, then, of all these items?
Just like I save items in games, in real life I too am reluctant to ask for favors or promote my own projects. (Sometimes I even save all my favourite treats and I never eat the last one). I treated these social and professional resources as if they were single-use “magical items”, not to be wasted but reserved for some important-yet-undefined future magnum opus event.
Recently I played Baldur’s Gate 3 and I decided to try something new: I would actually gasp use my items as needed, as they were intended, without undue reservation. Not only was it actually fun to use my fireball scrolls and blow stuff up, but I also discovered new layers and hidden quests. For instance, using a ‘Speak with the Dead’ scroll on a certain suspicious corpse unveiled a questline I would have otherwise missed.
